Collaboration is the secret to success in any human endeavour. Why? Because to collaborate is to co-labour. If you’re just going to do everything on your own, you limit what you can accomplish and what you can contribute. In this webinar series we want to share with you what makes this possible, how to do this for yourself and how to help others do this.
PRICES - Members: £85 + VAT / Non-Members: £150 + VAT / Non-Members including 1 year AC Associate membership: £135 + VAT

A series of four online seminars: 60 minute interactive webinar every 2 weeks

Webinars

30 January Collaboration: Why bother - and how to do it
13 February Barriers to collaboration: What could possibly go wrong?
27 February Creating a pathway to collaboration
6 March Inspiring collaboration: Being a collaborative leader & creating a collaborative culture

Short description of the topic

Collaboration is the secret to success in any human endeavour. Why? Because to collaborate is to co-labour. If you’re just going to do everything on your own, you limit what you can accomplish and what you can contribute.

Being able to collaborate is one thing. Being able to foster a collaborative culture and working environment for others is quite another. That’s why learning how to promote collaborative working practices is one of the most important skills any leader can develop.

Collaboration is a learnable skill: people can learn to collaborate. In this webinar series we want to share with you what makes this possible, how to do this for yourself and how to help others do this.

Topics and schedule for the webinar series:

Webinar 1: Collaboration: Why bother - and how to do it.

The power of collaboration has brought about the age of science, technology and space exploration that we live in. In these areas we are benefiting from a level of collaboration that is unparalleled in human history. However, closer to home we see numerous examples of people lacking the skills that would enable them to collaborate effectively.

Collaboration is people working together to create something that no one individual can create or do single-handedly. Fostering collaboration addresses one of the most destructive problems troubling businesses and organizations - disengagement. Collaboration creates a sense of ownership and can be good for the bottom line. But more than this the very experience of collaboration changes us.

Webinar 2: Barriers to collaboration: What could possibly go wrong?

Collaborations go wrong more often than they go well. So, what’s the problem? Basically, anything that is corrosive of trust is a barrier to collaborating. You can co-operate for mutual gain and keep things pretty transactional. But if you’re going to collaborate you’re going to need to get involved in a more emotionally committed way: in order to collaborate you must invest yourself. In some sense you have to let go and step outside your comfort zone. That’s why trust is so important. So is it safe to do so? How would you know and what can you do to make sure? Time to get familiar with the terrain and the barriers you meet along the way.

Webinar 3: Creating a pathway to collaboration

Where have you successfully collaborated? Where have you successfully fostered collaboration? How did you do that? If you’re a coach - or you use a coach approach in your work - then odds are you’ve done this with clients or direct reports. At its best coaching can be a demonstration of how to collaborate: coach and coachee come together to determine and achieve shared outcomes which are mutually defined and periodically reassessed by both parties. Coaching is naturally collaborative and good coaches can model collaboration. So what can we learn from the coach approach that we can apply whenever we wish to foster collaboration?

Webinar 4: Inspiring Collaboration: Being a collaborative leader and creating a collaborative culture

The goal of collaboration is not collaboration but what it makes possible. You bring different people together and they deliver something which none of them could have achieved without each other. Successful collaboration is not about cloning yourself. It’s about finding a way of working with other peoples’ models of the world; it’s about having the flexibility and the staying power to work together to achieve what matters more than you being right. The challenge for the collaborative leader is to foster the appreciation of difference among those working together and to maximise value from those differences. So how to do this?

Recordingswill be made available for all registered participants.

Speaker Bio:

Ian McDermott is the Founder of International Teaching Seminars which this year celebrates its 30th Anniversary. By collaborating Ian pioneered the integration of NLP and Coaching. For the past six years he has been doing the same for NLP and Neuroscience, and more recently Coaching and Neuroscience with his colleague Patricia Riddell, Professor of Applied Neuroscience.

Ian is an Honorary Fellow of Exeter University Business School where his focus is on innovation and entrepreneurship. A UKCP accredited psychotherapist, he is also External Faculty at Henley Business School where he helped create the MSc. in Coaching and Behavioural Change. Ian is AC Global Ambassador for Innovation and Collaboration.

Ian has trained a generation of coaches and is a prolific author. His most recent book is The Collaborative Leader. Nowadays he spends much of his time advising senior leaders.